I’ve played countless Doom engine games, so believe me when I say this one that combines the FPS with JRPG combat might be the coolest one in 30 years

I know my Doom, and its many derivatives. I’ve been covering it for years. It has almost never left my PC in over three decades, so I do not say this lightly. End of Starchild—a completely free, standalone game from prolific musician and indie dev Em Essex—might be the single coolest thing built on Doom’s venerable, time-tested foundations.

Play it.

If that’s not enough to convince you to download a whole 36 megabytes of game, then how about this; End Of Starchild (standalone sequel to 2021’s Time Tripper, which you should also play) is Doom refined and polarized into a finely tuned, ultra-stylish bullet hell arcade game. It’s a brisk six levels of blasting through ornate eldritch environments at ludicrous speeds (even faster than Doomguy’s 60mph sprint), weaving through blankets of shmup-styled neon bullets thrown your way by an all-new cast of enemies. They each drop single-use consumable sub-weapons, adding an improvisational edge to the action.

Every map feels truly distinct, with a distinct aesthetic, pacing and rhythm, from dancing between ambushes in the wings of a surprisingly cozy cult library complex to a psychedelic neon arena rave accompanied by chaotic battle-chatter. It’s bookended by gorgeous animated title cards for each level (“Her Warm Words In Winter” is a hell of a name for a Doom map), and after each sortie you return to your protagonist’s inner-city apartment, which gradually fills up with unlockable decor and unsettling yet poetic letters in your mailbox.

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The weapons are familiar, for the most part, but punchier than their OG counterparts. The shotgun (singular) hits like a truck. The machine gun deals more damage if you keep the fire button held down. Rockets hit almost instantly and explode in a skull-shaped cloud inspired by some classic shmups.

Each enemy feels like an arcade reinterpretation of a classic Doom archetype, often firing a mixture of pink (directly aimed) or blue (radial/random) bullets to be navigated. A few concepts feel entirely new for Doom, like a cosmic wizard who warps around evasively every time he takes damage, while opening lingering portals to Saturn’s rings to pelt you with micro-meteorites.

If that sounds unnecessarily cool, End of Starchild carries that vibe through the whole game. Even the save system is stylish. Instead of quicksaving freely, you can create checkpoints at kiosks run by a gravelly voiced gremlin of a shopkeeper, who’ll remember your progress if you trade in a little blood (health), sweat (your score) or tears (resolve, the game’s equivalent to armor) for a second chance. There’s character to every action, no matter how small—difficulty selection is handled through the elevator panel in your character’s apartment building.

And if you’re good, you might be done in three hours or less. But that’s the first layer.

(Image credit: em essex)

Sure, the levels are designed to be replayed. The Hard mode gives all enemies new, distinctly more evil behaviors (the Cacodemon equivalents become Pain Elemental hybrids), and there’s a shmup-inspired ranking system that subtly cranks up the difficulty if you’re scoring especially well, or dials it down if you’re dying repeatedly. But that’s just the surface.

The second layer is a nonlinear scavenger hunt. End of Starchild is also an almost Yume Nikki-like oneiric exploration game. How much is real and how much is allegory is up to interpretation, but once you’ve cleared out the worst of the enemies in a level you can scour the maps for secrets and really get to grips with the quirky air-dashing mechanics to explore off the main path. Not to spoil too much, but don’t forget to rest your weary head, and seek to remember when you’ve the option to.

Most important are areas of fragmented memory that your protagonist (a purple-haired, horned, non-binary demon-slayer named Elph) is having trouble reconciling, and which have permanent, unsettling effects on the rest of the game. Hidden threads and riddles to solve abound, leading towards a new, bombastic finale that is absolutely worth the effort to find. Honestly every major secret feels individually significant, as if you’re pulling back the veil on something that doesn’t want to be looked at directly.

That alone will add another several hours of exploration, puzzling and combat to End of Starchild. But there’s a third layer.

Sonata.

(Image credit: em essex)

Sonata is a whole second game. Specifically, a NES-styled JRPG. And yes, this is all still somehow running in the GZDoom engine, albeit a slightly customized version.

Sonata feels like an 8-bit echo of the game it’s nestled within. Low on directly delivered story but with throbbing masses of ominous flavor text, unsettling enemy designs and tough, unusual combat that plays a little bit like a more claustrophobic version of Mega Man Battle Network, both you and your enemy attacking in real-time on a shared 3×3 grid.

(Image credit: em essex)

Sonata, too, is a warren of secrets (including a brutal optional super-boss), made all the more tense by having no save system. Knowledge and experience can get you back up to speed after a death, but panicking and dying to a boss can cost you a lot of time and progress, which is why health potions (and the item that lets you increase your chance of escaping fights) are good investments for your early-game gold. It’s a whole new unsettling facet to the game that slowly evolves and reveals itself as you explore the 3D worlds above.

To plumb every depth of End of Starchild and see all of its endings (so far as I’m aware) took me around 15 hours, and has landed the game on my 2026 GOTY shortlist. While small in scope (there are much bigger Doom campaigns out there), the layered design gives it the same texture as my 2023 top pick Void Stranger. A game where it feels like every time you think you’ve seen the bottom of the well, a false wall shifts open to reveal yet darker depths.

Even if you don’t do Doom, I cannot recommend this one enough. Just don’t be afraid to dial it down to Easy mode or use the Accessibility options. This one’s tough.

Final PSA: Some overzealous virus scanners are insistent that the game contains a trojan. After extensive testing across multiple heuristics, this is almost certainly a false positive.